Is the Utah Life & Health Exam Hard? Pass Rates and Difficulty (2026)

The Utah Life and Accident & Health exam is moderately hard, and the pass-rate data says so. The NAIC's compiled figures for Utah (English-language, first-time candidates, in-person and remote combined) put the combined Life, Accident and Health exam at 54.2% in 2024 and 71.3% in 2025. In 2024 close to half of first-time candidates failed it. In 2025 roughly seven in ten passed.

The exam is not hard because the ideas are exotic. It is hard because it is wide: a combined exam of 150 items in 2.5 hours that covers life insurance, annuities, taxation, health plans, Medicare and long-term care in one sitting, plus a Utah-law section. Utah also has no pre-licensing requirement, so nobody hands you a structured course before you sit it. Preparation is entirely your own job.

Utah offers three exams and the NAIC reports each one separately. Here are the numbers as compiled:

Exam	2024 candidates	2024 pass rate	2025 candidates	2025 pass rate
Life	2,137 (1,093 passed)	51.1%	1,856 (1,229 passed)	66.2%
Accident and Health	545 (357 passed)	65.5%	419 (322 passed)	76.8%
Life, Accident and Health (combined)	3,550 (1,924 passed)	54.2%	2,354 (1,679 passed)	71.3%

In both years the Life exam had the lowest pass rate of the three, and the Accident and Health exam had the highest. The combined exam, which contains both bodies of knowledge, sat between them.

Between 2024 and 2025 every pass rate rose sharply: Life by 15.1 percentage points, Accident and Health by 11.3 and the combined exam by 17.1. At the same time the number of first-time candidates fell: Life from 2,137 to 1,856, Accident and Health from 545 to 419 and the combined exam from 3,550 to 2,354.

That combination of fewer candidates and higher pass rates could mean the exam got easier, the candidate pool changed, or the two yearly reports were compiled on a different basis. The published data cannot tell these apart, and we have not been able to confirm the reason with Prometric or the Utah Insurance Department. Treat 2025 as one data point, not as proof that the exam has become easy. The NAIC workbooks also do not publish repeat-taker pass rates, so there is no official figure for how candidates fare on a second attempt.

1. Breadth in one sitting. The combined exam's outline has 16 sections. The heaviest are Accident and Health Insurance Basics (12%), Medical Plans (10%) and Group Accident and Health Insurance (10%), followed by Life Insurance Policy Provisions, Options and Riders (9%) and Annuities (9%). You cannot afford to be strong on life and weak on health, or the reverse.

2. Precise terminology. The questions turn on distinctions: first-to-die against second-to-die, own-occupation against any-occupation, HMO against POS against EPO, specific against aggregate stop-loss. Each pair sounds alike to a beginner and each is a place to lose marks.

3. The Utah-law layer. The outline's Insurance Regulation section is 7% of the exam, and Prometric's outline cites specific Utah Code Title 31A provisions and Utah Administrative Code R590 rules inline across its sections. General national study material does not cover those citations.

4. An unpublished passing score. Prometric's current Licensing Information Bulletin describes a pass/fail report with a percentage breakdown by section, but it does not print a numeric cutoff. Do not plan around a number you have heard from someone else. Plan to know every section well.

The data does not break failures down by background, so we cannot say who fails in numbers. What we can say is where preparation usually goes wrong on an exam shaped like this one:

1. Studying one half. Candidates from a life-sales background underrate the health side, which carries the three largest weights on the outline, and the reverse happens with health backgrounds and the tax mechanics of annuities and life policies.
2. Reading instead of practising. Tax rules such as how a surrendered annuity or a withdrawal from a life policy is taxed need worked questions, not just a read-through.
3. Skipping the Utah rules. A short section is easy to leave for last, then leave out.
4. Rushing a retake. A failed attempt comes with a section-by-section breakdown. Candidates who rebook without using it repeat the same gaps.

Start by choosing your path. Utah lets you sit the combined exam (Series 17-03, $44) or the Life exam (Series 17-01) and the Accident and Health exam (Series 17-02) separately at $32 each. If you need both lines of authority, the format and outline page shows what each path contains.

Then study in proportion to the outline. Spend your hours where the weights are: accident and health basics, medical plans, group coverage, policy provisions and annuities first, then the smaller sections. Listen to the audio chapters to build the vocabulary, then test yourself with practice questions and read every explanation, including for questions you got right. Our free Utah practice question set samples every part of the outline, and how to pass on the first try lays out a study plan.

You can try the course free in the course preview. If you do fail, the retake rules page explains what Prometric and the Department say about a second attempt.